Backup of an Oracle DB on RDS and EC2

When you use RDS, the Oracle database is automatically backed up to S3 for you. You can also take a DB snapshot at anytime or schedule snap shots.  The cost of the backup is included in the price of the database.  You will be charged for the storage in S3 for snapshots.

Amazon RDS enables automated backups of your DB Instance with a 1 day retention period. Free backup storage is limited to the size of your provisioned database and only applies to active DB Instances. For example, if you have 10GB-months of provisioned database storage, AWS will provide at most 10GB-months of backup storage at no additional charge.

You can not use tools like Oracle RMAN or the Oracle Secure Backup for S3 to backup Oracle RDS.

Oracle Secure Backup details

If you are just getting started with Oracle Secure Backup for AWS, here are some resources to help you get started:

• Oracle White paper : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/availability/twp-oracledbcloudbackup-130129.pdf

• Oracle web page : http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/secure-backup/overview/index.html

• Oracle in the Cloud : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/oracle-in-the-cloud-datasheet-1-133113.pdf?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen

• Amazon.com case study : http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/

• Amazon.com detailed case study : http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Amazon_Oracle_Backups.pdf

• Avnet Offering : http://www.avnetcloudready.com/solutions/backup-disaster-recovery/cloud-backup-for-oracle-database/
• Getting Started with Oracle Secure Backup and RMAN with Amazon S3 http://aws.amazon.com/backup-storage/gsg-oracle-rman/

AWS disaster recovery for applications, database and storage

When coming up with an approach to perform disaster recovery on AWS from your on premise environment,  you need to look at these layers of your system as individual entities.  This is because for each of them their are different tools and approaches.

1. Storage Layer: The storage layer includes multi media files, batch files, log files and any other files that not directly owned by the application or database server.  These files are typically on SAN or NAS devices on premise.

More information here:

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-premise-application-replication-and.html

2. Database Layer:  This would be data files associated with your relational or NoSQL database.  There are many database vendor specific tools. So the best approach is typically to use the tool or facility provided by the DB vendor.  More information in these blog entries:
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/01/disaster-recovery-in-cloud-options.html
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/03/aws-ebs-snapshot-volumes-for-mysql.html – More on snapshots as apply to MySQL

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/03/aws-ec2-oracle-database-backup.html - OSB or EBS snapshots
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2012/10/oracle-helps-amazon-save-money-on.html – More on OSB
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/01/oracle-exadata-dr-to-cloud.html - Exadata
http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/02/oracle-secure-backup-restore.html – Recovery speed for OSB

3. Application Layer:  The application layer includes all source code (Java, PHP, Ruby, HTML etc), log files and anything else associated with your application server.

More entries in these blog entries:

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2012/11/aws-storage-gateway-for-application-dr.html

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-premise-application-replication-and.html

AWS EC2 Oracle Database backup

The two most common approaches for backing up Oracle databases hosted on EC2/EBS:  
1. The Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module allows Oracle's Recovery Manager (RMAN) to backup/restore directly to/from S3.  https://aws.amazon.com/backup-storage/gsg-oracle-rman/ 
2. DBAs can put their tablespaces in hot backup mode, issue EBS snapshots using the EC2 CLI (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/OperationList-cmd.html), and then take the Oracle database out of hot backup mode as soon as the EC2 EBS snapshot API call returns.  While in hot backup mode, Oracle logs the full block images to the online and archived redo logs. There is a write up here on how this works:

http://www.bluegecko.net/oracle/oracle-tablespace-hot-backup-mode-revisited/

Oracle Secure Backup restore

A benchmark test using OSB, a DBA, was able to restore 3.8 terabytes in 2.5 hours over gigabit Ethernet. This amounts to 25 gigabytes per minute, or 422MB per second. This 2.5 hours using OSB and S3 compares to, conservatively, 10-15 hours that would be required to restore from tape.

Oracle Exadata DR to the cloud

Nice case study on using AWS to provide a cloud based DR solution for Oracle Exadata:
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/Sogeti/

Oracle helps Amazon save money on database backups

Very good article on moving from tape storage to AWS S3 for Oracle Database backups and archiving:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-oracle-yes-oracle-helped-amazon-suck-the-cost-out-of-database-backup/

White paper can be found here:

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Amazon_Oracle_Backups.pdf

There are some very good ideas on how to secure you backup data both in transit and at rest.

You can find the Oracle Secure Back solution for AWS here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/secure-backup/secure-backup-s3-484709.html

AWS Oracle Test Drive Labs

Want to see Oracle Secure Backup (OSB), Oracle DataGuard, Oracle APEX, Oracle Peoplesoft, Oracle Siebel, Oracle EBusiness Suite or other Oracle technologies and applications running on AWS in the public cloud.  Then go here:
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/oracle/labs/